Political Test May Loom for the Cuomos’ Bond

Andrew M. Cuomo with his parents, Mario and Matilda Cuomo, in November 2006, when he won the race for state attorney general.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

On a recent night at City College, former Gov. Mario M. Cuomo spoke with characteristic eloquence of the national economy and the forgotten poor, and of President Obama and the challenge ahead. He was self-deprecating and witty and earned a long ovation.

Afterward, a gaggle of reporters trailed him, a single question on their lips: What do you think of your son’s chances in the governor’s race?

The elder Cuomo sidestepped it. “I guess you didn’t like the speech,” he said. Then he smiled faintly and continued out the door.

For decades, Mario Cuomo’s relationship with his son has been close, intense and dominated by the former governor, who is a lover of ideas and argument, and is an often overpowering presence. Across three elections for governor, young Andrew stood at the campaign helm for him, yelling at the deckhands, trying to steer his father to victory. In return, his father put his team of advisers and his own political talents at his son’s disposal, helping him gain a Clinton administration appointment and embark on a political career.

Now 52, Andrew M. Cuomo has his eyes fixed on claiming his father’s old job in Albany, and, perhaps, finally emerging from his considerable shadow. Mario Cuomo is edging toward his 78th birthday and is no longer the most influential voice in his son’s circle.

But the relationship between father and son is as loving, tangled and laced with competitiveness as it ever was. And Andrew’s race for governor looms as a new test of this most intriguing hybrid of a political and familial bond.

Mention one to the other these days, and the Cuomos’ eyes roll and their voices slide sardonic; they rely on friends and reporters to convey their (mostly loving) jabs at each other.

“I am a huge fan of the Cuomo family, but they are very challenging,” says Michael Dowling, who served as Mario Cuomo’s chief health adviser. “The intonation, the Jesuitical style of questioning; you close your eyes and one sounds like the other. The closer you are, the more they love to debate.”

Father and son talk multiple times each week, kibitzing, arguing, conspiring, and the former governor still calls old associates in Albany on his son’s behalf. “He asks, ‘How do you think Andrew is doing? What do you hear?’ ” says a lobbyist and a longtime Cuomo associate. “You can hear his concern.”

Mario Cuomo agreed to be interviewed for this article and offered a reporter a strategy for persuading his son to do the same. (“Andrew likes to be in control,” the former governor said. “So you call his office and say, ‘Look, I know Andrew doesn’t want to talk. But The Times, you know The Times, we are going to do this piece with or without you. You don’t want that to happen. You want to have your say.’ ”)

Andrew Cuomo, after talking it over with advisers, declined to discuss his relationship. Then his father stopped talking, too.

Photo

Mario M. Cuomo, surrounded by family members, including Andrew, left, after being defeated in the Democratic mayoral primary of 1977.Credit
Barton Silverman/The New York Times

‘Albany’s Odd Couple’

To peer at the grainy photograph from September 1977 of a glum Mario Cuomo, surrounded by his family, conceding a Democratic mayoral primary to Edward I. Koch is to be struck twice over: by how heartbroken Andrew appeared and by how young he was — not yet 20.

“He was an adolescent and took more responsibility for the defeat than he had to,” said Norman Adler, then a top labor official and now a lobbyist. “He was trying to live up to his father’s expectations.”

Mario and Matilda Cuomo raised their family, three daughters and two sons, in Hollis, Queens. They were, and remain, a tight-knit bunch.

“We live very close and are close, and it’s a mixed blessing,” said the elder Cuomo lightheartedly. “There are weddings, christenings, bar mitzvahs all the time.”

Matilda Cuomo knows her politics, and the daughters have volunteered in campaigns. But only Andrew entered the family business. His first task, Mario Cuomo has recalled, was “putting my posters up and pulling the other guy’s down.”

In the early 1980s, father and son became roommates, sharing an apartment in Albany while Andrew attended law school there and his father served as lieutenant governor. A New York Times article from that period described them as “Albany’s odd couple,” sharing care packages of food from Matilda.

“We’d come home, one of us would burn something for dinner, and we’d talk,” Andrew recalled in that article.

In 1982, Mario appointed Andrew, 24, to manage his long-shot run for governor. That partnership revealed two men possessed of different talents. Mario Cuomo was the boss, a reader and a thinker, a perfectionist who viewed competition as vocation and avocation. Andrew Cuomo shared the competitive bloodlust, but he was as much his mother’s son, more practical and with an acute emotional antenna. Talk to the father and maybe he listens and maybe not; talk to the son and the focus is laserlike.

The elder Cuomo spared no one the lash in that campaign, not the least his son. He was so tough on him that Mr. Adler, who was deputy campaign manager, once walked into the candidate’s office.

Andrew M. Cuomo, right, with Steven Cohen, his chief of staff, in April. Mr. Cuomo has not formally declared a candidacy for governor.Credit
Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Father and son described their relationship during that campaign as “businesslike.” The younger Cuomo, determined to play down his familial connection, addressed the candidate as “Mario.” (He still does.)

The crucible of that race shaped Andrew Cuomo’s enduring image: intensity cubed, a devious fellow. There is some truth there. (“He was very aggressive, to put it gently,” said former Representative Herman Badillo, who worked on that campaign.) But as a verdict it is too facile.

William Stern, who was campaign treasurer, shared a cramped office with Andrew. “Mario was Italian opera, all highs and lows,” he said. “Andrew just stayed focused.”

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As the election neared, and the race appeared tight to the point of asphyxiation, Andrew began to worry that something might go wrong, just as in 1977. “He tried to hijack the field operation at the last minute, sending in his college classmates,” Mr. Adler said. “He just didn’t want it to be his fault that Mario lost. He was blood; this election was on him.”

After a narrow victory, Mario appointed Andrew to oversee his transition in Albany. The younger Cuomo displayed an impressive memory, particularly for the names of those Democrats who had opposed his father.

He served on his father’s staff as a 2-cent-a-week adviser. He did not remain long, but he never lost his father’s ear on questions of strategy and politics. The former governor describes those years as painful and instructive, for his son.

“The governorship gave him an opportunity to experience the mistakes I made for 12 years,” Mr. Cuomo said this year. “He bled every time I was hurt, and I think that makes it less likely that he’s going to make the same mistakes.”

The governor’s indecision about his presidential ambitions became a sore point between them. In 1992, Mr. Cuomo kept an airplane waiting on the tarmac, ready to fly to New Hampshire to declare his candidacy.

“He never pulled the trigger, and that’s been on Andrew’s mind ever since,” said a political kingmaker who has known the Cuomos for three decades and spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of offending them. “It made Andrew more ready to go on his gut.”

In 1992, the elder Cuomo pushed to get his son on the transition committee for the new Democratic administration in Washington. Then he lobbied hard to persuade President Bill Clinton to appoint Andrew as deputy secretary at HUD, according to Henry G. Cisneros, the former HUD secretary.

In 1997, Andrew became chief at HUD. He kept a high profile and pulled close to the Clintons. His office circulated a memo, former employees say, instructing staff members to refer to him not as Andrew but as “Mr. Secretary,” and he told friends that he was the nation’s housing czar, as opposed, say, to the governor of a single state.

Photo

Mario M. Cuomo at City College in April. Though he still calls old associates in Albany on his son’s behalf, he is no longer the most influential voice in his son’s circle.Credit
James Estrin/The New York Times

“There was this sense of rivalry — Andrew seemed to feel that his dad talked a good game but that he, Andrew, got things done,” said a former official who served under Mr. Cuomo at HUD and spoke anonymously out of concern he would offend a possible future governor. “Andrew was trying to play catch up fast.”

The Son’s Rebirth

Andrew Cuomo’s re-entry into New York politics amounted to a near-death experience. He galloped into the 2002 race for governor as the front-runner, faltered and withdrew days before the primary. The next year, he suffered through a War of the Roses dynastic divorce from Kerry Kennedy.

Afterward, the elder Mr. Cuomo took his son in hand and slowly restored his luster. He dialed old donors and talked up his son, and helped lay the groundwork for his son’s next political race. If you wanted Mario’s endorsement, you had to take Andrew’s as well.

In 2006, with his son running for attorney general, Mario approached George Arzt, a former press secretary to Mr. Koch, at the Regency Hotel in New York and told him, “ ‘I’d like to patch things up with Ed,’ ” Mr. Arzt recalled. “I asked him what he had in mind. And he said, ‘Could Ed endorse Andrew?’ ”

None of this could have been easy. A former governor in his 70s squiring around his son the former cabinet secretary is a good definition of tense. At a breakfast with an operative, Mario nodded his head at his son and said: “He’s thick skulled; he won’t listen to me. Tell him what to do.” The operative, who spoke anonymously in order to preserve access to the two men, recalled that Andrew interjected: “Oh, Mario, give me a break. I’ve been in politics for 20 years.”

The restoration worked. Andrew ran a near-flawless campaign for state attorney general and beat the favorite, Mark Green. Since taking office in 2007, he has been a muscular attorney general, taking on Wall Street and the mortgage industry, with few of the histrionics favored by his predecessor, Eliot Spitzer. And he has carefully positioned himself to run for governor, although he has been coy about declaring himself.

The elder Cuomo’s role is different now. Some liken him to an éminence grise.

“Mario now hears about decisions long after they have been made,” said a family adviser, who did not want to be identified because he was breaking a confidence. “That does not mean Andrew does not call. But there’s a difference between giving Dad a heads up and asking him to sign off.”

Still, the younger Cuomo’s political inner circle is stocked with old advisers to his father, and they talk to Mario. “Mario has the same wisdom as ever,” said William B. Eimicke, who was Mr. Cuomo’s housing czar and is a professor at Columbia University. “Why wouldn’t you use it?”

Mario Cuomo’s challenge now is to temper his impulse to speak his mind and refrain from his trademark conversational jujitsu. (In 1996, a reporter inquired about Andrew’s possible run for the Senate, and Mario replied, “How do you know I’m not going to run?”)

For now, Mario Cuomo acknowledges only that he is ready to saddle up. “If audiences are willing to take a sad second, I will go out and talk for him,” he said.

As to their changing relationship, father and son express frustration with the endless literary allusions and amateur psychoanalysis. To the elder Cuomo, the Shakespeare this and the Freudian that is silliness. Yes, he is a strong-willed and loving father, and, yes, he has a strong-willed and loving son.

“People say, ‘Oh, they have such a complicated relationship,’ ” Mario Cuomo said. “Do you know any father who doesn’t have a complicated relationship with his son?”

He paused, and added, “Incidentally, it doesn’t get less complicated as it goes on.”

A version of this article appears in print on May 3, 2010, on Page A17 of the New York edition with the headline: New Political Test May Emerge For Father-Son Bond. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe